This paper examines how preferential credit based on retailers’ credit line impacts on capital-constraint retailer’s operational decisions. We consider a condition of loan competition when banks and manufacturers offer preferential credit to capital-constraint retailers in the newsvendor model. Different credit lines and discounted rates of preferential credit mainly involve in retailers’ exogenous collateral and risk preference of banks and manufacturers in our model. We investigate impacts of bank financing, trade credit, and portfolio credit (financing from both bank credit and trade credit with different ratios) on retailer’s inventory decision with different cases that the retailer’s financing amounts exceed credit line or not. We derive the equilibrium wholesale price, expected sale price, and order quantity when retailers face with different conditions of collaterals and institutes’ risk preferences facing with market risk. A debt-financed retailer favours items with trade credit compared to bank financing, especially in conditions when its sourcing demand is great and when it finances from high-risk preference institutes. Retailer prefers to using the loan with high trade credit ratio when he opts portfolio credit conditions.

We use hotelling model to analyse store brands as a strategy for B&M (brick-and-mortar) retailers to combat showrooming. We investigate how national-brand product mismatch and store-brand awareness affect supply chain's performance. We reach four major conclusions. First, store-brand strategy may be an effective means for B&M stores to mitigate showrooming. However, it's better to introduce premium store brands. Second, the B&M store's profit grows - and the online store's profit declines - as national-brand product mismatch increases in breadth. When many consumers feel the national-brand product does not match their needs, a product positioning strategy for the store brand can help B&M retailers improve profit margins. Third, as national-brand product mismatch increases in depth, the B&M store's profit rises and online store's profit falls. If national-brand products lack many features that consumers need, a product differentiation strategy can be implemented to use store brands to fill in the gaps left by national brands. Finally, the growth of store-brand awareness will not necessarily benefit the B&M store. The impact of store-brand awareness on the B&M store's profit depends on the hassle cost factort, and a brand promotion strategy will reduce the loss of B&M retailer's profit.

This study examines the joint impact of the vertical cross-shareholdings and external financing, including trade credit and bank loans, on the order strategy of a capital-constrained retailer. We set the target retailer and his supplier, which are connected with vertical cross-shareholdings, in the extended Cournot and Stackelberg game. The capital-constrained retailer could raise external financing when he has exhausted his own cash. Besides, the retailer may be faced with the random shock result from the other business. We use optimal response function to model how the capital-constrained retailer determines his order quantity under cross-shareholdings in response to different market conditions (such as his own cash level and other competitor's order strategy). We find that, the retailer orders more under cross-shareholdings if the retailer is well-funded with his own cash or external financing, resulting in a win-win situation for the supplier and retailer. However, if the retailer has run out of all his cash and credit, the cross-shareholdings have no effect on the retailer's order strategy. Thus, it helps the capital-constrained retailer to acquire competitive advantage that he could be well-funded with external financing under cross-shareholdings.

The online celebrity economy, also called the internet celebrity economy, is growing rapidly in China. Celebrity retailers are usually demand sensitive and capital constrained. The capital constraints along with information asymmetry often render supply chains inefficient when manufacturers are producing at non-optimal levels. Few studies have shed light on the online celebrity supply chain, especially with respect to options. In this study, we examine how option contracts can coordinate supply chains. We find that a capital-constrained retailer can achieve more profitable orders when given an option. The manufacturer - without the full information of market demand - also benefits from offering an option to the retailer. Our numerical case shows that the options contract generates different payoffs depending on the capital of the retailer.

This study investigates a due date quoting problem for a project with stochastic duration, taking the decision-maker's risk attitude into consideration. The project profit is defined as the difference between the price and the cost that is comprised of production cost and earliness-tardiness penalties. In this situation, the due date determination has to be modelled as a stochastic optimisation due to stochastic duration. Conditional value at risk is thus employed as a performance measure to describe the decision-maker's risk attitude. In fixed price contract, when the unit production cost is not smaller than the unit penalty on earliness, the optimal due date increases with the increase of the degree of a decision-maker's risk aversion, the unit penalty on delay, and the decrease of the unit penalty on earliness. Besides, when the price is proportional to the due date and the slope is no bigger than the unit penalty on tardiness, the optimal due date is smaller than the result in fixed price. This is because high price for a short due date encourages a decision-maker to quote a small due date. Further, we compare the optimal due date in different parameter setting where the penalty coefficient of earliness is negative or zero, which means there is reward or no penalty on earliness, respectively. Finally, a case study is conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model.